Abstract

Kant’s pursuit of the conditions of a priori knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason cannot be appreciated without considering his account of the multifaceted activities carried out by the imagination. As is well-known, his critical philosophy aimed to dismiss both the rationalist view that knowledge is acquired by the understanding alone and the skeptical challenges of Hume that a priori cognition is impossible. I show that this argument of Kant's grew out of his view of the imagination, which is said to bridge the conditions of thought and the conditions of sensibility. As to the latter, the imagination operates at the empirical level by apprehending and reproducing sensible representations; with regard to apprehension, he argues that the imagination itself drives perception, and with regard to reproduction, the imagination produces an image of the manifold whether or not one can actually perceive it. I claim that this holds for Kant's account of the transcendental imagination as well, which represents any possible object. My view is based on, at least in part, on what I take to be Kant’s account of the transcendental object. I show that it cannot be considered an object at all, but only a projection of the imagination that allows the categories to subsume any possible object of experience. Extending this line of thought to the Transcendental Dialectic, I maintain that reason relies on the transcendental imagination insofar as it posits the transcendental object as an idea that provides unity in all cognitions. So, I also make the case that reason necessarily requires the involvement of the imagination. Thus, my primary aim in this work is to elucidate the way in which the imagination allows both the understanding and reason to posit a manifold of representations as an object independently of experience. Using the categories, the understanding does so by guiding the imagination’s figurative synthesis in its determination of time. Reason, on the other hand, does so by positing the ideas as imaginary objects of complete unity. To my mind, Kant’s argument that the imagination carries out multiple functions can be said to make possible his critical project as a whole.